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January 29, 2015

Dragons at Crumbling Castle and
Other Tales. By Terry Pratchett. Illustrations by Mark Beech. Clarion.
$16.99.

Many years ago, when there
were wolves in Wales – no, that’s not it. Once upon a time, or twice – no, not
that either. Everyone comes from somewhere – that’s it. Everyone comes from somewhere, and where Terry Pratchett
of Discworld fame comes from is
Buckinghamshire, England, where once upon a time, or twice, back in the 1960s,
a young Pratchett worked for the local newspaper, not only reporting on many
and varied local events (none of them particularly significant) but also
writing for the paper’s “Children’s Corner” under the pseudonym “Uncle Jim,”
creating a wide variety of stories (some of them particularly significant, at
least in retrospect).

Dragons at Crumbling Castle is, many years later, the result of
Pratchett’s youthful indiscretions, so to speak. The 14 stories here were not
intended for the ages (newspaper writing never is), but they were intended for those of a young age,
and this book is therefore a marvelous introduction to the world (or worlds) of
Terry, now Sir Terry and regaled with honors aplenty for his many and various
works of more-recent times. There are a few direct tie-ins of these early
stories to Pratchett’s books: “Tales of the Carpet People” and “Another Tale of
the Carpet People” eventually led to Pratchett’s very first book, entitled, not
surprisingly, The Carpet People. But
most of the relationships between these short pieces and Pratchett’s later work
are in the realm of sensibility rather than specific characters or themes. Just
to stick with “Tales of the Carpet People” for a moment, for example, one
character tells another, “Worthwhile things aren’t just there for the taking,
you know,” and that sounds very much like later Pratchett (although in his
later books, worthwhile things are
sometimes just there for the taking). And in the same story, which is a
journey-to-a-new-land sort of thing with echoes of Mary Norton’s The Borrowers, Pratchett writes,
“Something large and black seemed to be dancing around the bottom of the hair,
blowing its nose menacingly.” And that too sounds a bit, just a bit, like later
Pratchett.

The thing is, Dragons at Crumbling Castle is fun both
for people who know later Pratchett and for those who encounter him here for
the first time. None of these stories is up to the level of his later work, but
so what? The themes of unlikely heroes, somewhat dangerous danger that usually
is not too dangerous, and all sorts
of unexpected narrative nooks and crannies, are in their formative stages in
these tales; they would emerge in their full splendor only later. Dragons at Crumbling Castle is
juvenilia, but it is mighty entertaining juvenilia.

So here we have the title
story, set in King Arthur’s time, featuring a reluctant boy sort-of knight, a
not-very-effective opposing knight, and a decidedly inept wizard who is nothing
at all like the later Rincewind but might be a very distant relation. We have a
heroic tortoise who sets out to see the world and conquers an asp along the way
– a tortoise named Hercules. We have a particularly short and particularly
funny story called “Hunt the Snorry” in which a large band of adventurers
searches for something known only by its name and does, alas, eventually find
it. We meet “Edwo, the Boring Knight,” “The Abominable Snowman,” and “The
Blackbury Monster.” We experience the nefarious machinations of Baron von Teu
as he does dirty deeds to make sure his gas-powered automobile defeats the
steam-powered one of Sir Henry Toggitt, which pulls a little coal tender behind
it, as shown in one of more than 100 hilarious and perfectly appropriate drawings
by Mark Beech. “The Big Race” includes not only gasoline and steam cars but
also a “mechanical car, with its eight drivers still hauling on the big key,”
and “an electric car, an elastic-driven car, a compressed-air truck, a hot air
balloon-powered bus, and two sail-powered bicycles.”

What is abundantly clear in
this collection of early Pratchett is that many years ago, when there may or
may not have been wolves in Wales but there were surely newspapers in
Buckinghamshire, there arose the initial stirrings of an imagination that grew
in later decades to produce some of the most prodigiously entertaining books to
be written in modern English. Whether Dragons
at Crumbling Castle is a young reader’s first introduction to Pratchett or
an older reader’s opportunity to examine the early work of a satirist who has
been compared with the greats of centuries past, it is a book that gives great
pleasure on its own while also whetting one’s appetite for examining or
re-examining later, larger-scale Pratchett – writing that is surely more
polished, finely wrought and weighty, but is scarcely more delightful.

Be true to yourself and
don’t trust labels. Those are the messages of Red, a very clever book by Michael Hall that features a crayon that
isn’t what it seems to be and a variety of other crayons that serve as a
combination of family members and a sort of Greek chorus. The crayon is called
Red – that’s what his red paper label says – but Red is actually blue, so no
matter how hard he tries, everything he creates comes out blue. His parents try
to help him live up to his Red label, as do his grandparents (who are much
shorter than the parents, since crayons wear down as they get older – a very
clever visualization). But the family members, like Red’s friends of various
colors, all see Red only in terms of what he is supposed to be, not what he
actually is. This could easily be a heavy-handed book about discrimination, but
it does not come across that way, because everyone really likes Red and wants
to help him. Scarlet shows him how to draw a strawberry, but of course Red’s is
not red. Yellow arranges for them to draw an orange together, but naturally the
orange is green, since blue + yellow = green. Lots of other crayons have
comments and suggestions about Red or for him, but nothing they say is very
helpful: “He’s got to press harder,” says Army Green, and optimistic Sunshine
says, “Give him time. He’ll catch on.” Amber actually wonders if Red is really
red, but Hazelnut says, “Don’t be silly. It says red on his label.” And
everyone accepts that. Everyone, that is, until Red meets a crayon called Berry,
who has drawn a boat and asks Red to make an ocean. Red says he can’t, since
oceans aren’t red, but he agrees to try, and lo and behold, he finds his true
color at last – and is soon drawing bluebells, blue jeans, blueberries and much
more. So now all the formerly skeptical crayons admire his work, with Yellow
planning “to make a green lizard with him” and Brown saying he always liked
Red’s blue strawberries. Thus everything ends happily and amusingly – but there
are some good lessons buried not too deeply in Red, the most important being to learn who you are and be who you
are, no matter how others may label you.

If Red is trying to find
himself, a little bear named Maurice is trying to find spring. Maurice is so
young that he has never seen spring, and when his mother says he has to sleep
first, then goes to sleep herself, Maurice is too bouncy and enthusiastic to
rest, much less to wait for the season he wants so much to see. Carin Berger
uses delightful cut-paper illustrations to show Maurice searching for spring,
thinking about all its wonders, asking the various animals where it is and how
to find it, and being blissfully oblivious to others’ preparations for winter,
such as Squirrel burying a big acorn and Robin flying south. On and on Maurice
goes, through some especially attractive woods (a number of the trees have bits
of words on them, from the paper with which they were made – an odd and somehow
very homey touch). Eventually, Maurice feels “an icy sting on his nose” and
finds that a beautiful crystal has landed there. It is so pretty that it must
be spring, he thinks, and he chases after the crystals as they continue to
fall, not knowing what they are but being convinced that they are spring. Eventually
Maurice puts a lot of them together and has – a snowball. He takes it home to
the den where Mama is sleeping peacefully, secure in the knowledge that he has
found spring at last and will show it to Mama when they wake up. When they do wake up, it really is spring, but of
course the snowball has long since melted. But is Maurice downhearted? Not at
all – he leads all the other animals to the Great Hill, where he stood during
the snowstorm that he thought was a shower of spring, and everyone sees that
the hill is now covered with flowers and spring has really and truly arrived.
Maurice’s naïveté and charm are thoroughly winning in a book that exudes
springtime warmth even in the middle of winter.

One thing that happens to
kids in winter is that they get sick: all that indoor time around other children,
some of them ill even if not symptomatic, seems to bring out more than a
season’s fair share of colds, flu, upset stomachs and other ills. A good book
to cheer up a homebound child is Orna Landau’s odd and exuberant Leopardpox! It is the story of a little
girl named Sadie who doesn’t feel quite well enough to go to kindergarten –
even though she doesn’t have a sore throat, rash or tummy ache. Sadie just
feels strange – so strange, in fact, that soon “her fingernails grew longer and
longer” and “her teeth grew sharper and sharper” and her mother realizes that
Sadie has, yes, leopardpox! Far from being a stay-in-bed-and-rest condition,
this one causes the little girl, now fully transformed into a small leopard
whose bounciness and delightful expressions are well-rendered by Omer Hoffmann,
to leap and jump and climb the curtains and knock things over and generally
have a wonderful time frolicking about. What can Mama do about this? She
gathers her three other children – boys named Gordon, Jordan and Bannister –
and heads for the pediatrician’s office. But leopard Sadie makes a major mess
there, and the doctor says he does not take care of leopards – so Mama and the
boys visit a veterinarian. He is delighted by the “healthy leopard cub,” but
when he finds out that Sadie is really a little girl, he says there is nothing
he can do – although he does ask whether perhaps Mama would like to keep her as
a “very cute and special leopard.” Where to go for help? The family next tries
the zoo, but Sadie refuses to go into a cage, and Mama yells so loudly at the
zookeepers who try to put her in one that the men (and several animals,
including a couple of real leopards) cower behind a tree as Mama and her boys
walk off in a huff. Everyone in the family eventually gives up on getting help
and returns home, where Mama cuddles and feeds and strokes the little leopard
until, later at night, Sadie turns slowly back into a sleepy girl. And Mama
snuggles happily into bed with Sadie, except that, well, now Mama feels a little funny…Amusingly absurd and absurdly amusing, Leopardpox! turns an ordinary sick day
into something very special both for the fictional Sadie and, potentially, for
real-world boys and girls who may be feeling a touch under the weather and could
use a creative way to deal with the blahs.

Getting Back Out There: Secrets
to Successful Dating and Finding Real Love after the Big Breakup. By Susan
J. Elliott. Da Capo. $14.99.

The underlying assumption of
Getting Back Out There is that
readers are already familiar with Susan Elliott’s previous book, Getting Past Your Breakup, and/or her
ongoing blog on the same subject. Readers who do not know Elliott’s other work
will not get far here – Elliott says at the start that this book is a sequel,
and it is peppered with comments such as, “If you have done the GPYB life inventory, review your work.”
It is theoretically possible to read Getting
Back Out There as a standalone book, but its value will be much diminished
on that basis. It is really an extension of what came before – in which sense
it is much like some post-breakup relationships.

Elliott, an attorney and
certified grief counselor who gives seminars and motivational speeches, sets
out to create something that goes well beyond the traditional “just throw
yourself back out there” approach to dating and hopefully finding love after a
breakup. Her underlying point is nothing new: we bring ourselves, all of
ourselves, to all our relationships, which means that we need to understand why
we choose certain kinds of unsatisfactory partners again and again if we are
going to break out of a negative pattern. This is the stuff of psychology and
psychoanalysis, not relationship-advice books, and Elliott does not delve very
deeply into it, although she does give some rather superficial examples of how
the past – dating back to one’s childhood – can and does influence one’s adult
relationship behavior.

The main point of Getting Back Out There, though, is to
find ways to get over the past and forge a new and better future. Again, this
is nothing new or unusual, but Elliott creates a structure that she says can
help people reentering the dating scene. This is essentially a combination of
understanding the past by making extensive notes about it (she uses the word
“inventory” in several contexts) and deciding what you want the future to be
(which involves, among other things, some rather surface-level notions, such as
writing daily affirmations). One chapter subhead, “How Early Experiences Cloud
Adult Experiences,” really stands for what the entire book is about. “Being
real instead of putting on a show is a very difficult change to make,” Elliott
writes in a chapter on sex, but the comment actually applies throughout the
book.

Elliott takes readers
through “the five Rs” of rebuilding (which would be a sixth R) after a breakup.
They are Readiness (“make a proactive and conscious decision that you are ready
to date”); Rejection (“taking a new view of rejection as something that is beneficial
is important”); Recycling (“you feel as if you just broke up yesterday and all
the emotions of loss come flooding in”); Rebounding (“going into another
relationship right out of the old one without working through a breakup”); and
Retreating (“moving back to the cocoon that you left to peek outside and see
what was happening”). Elliott quotes various people, of many ages, describing
how these stages feel: a large part of Getting
Back Out There focuses on telling readers they are not alone by offering
them comments from many other post-breakup men and women. Another large part
involves frequently reminding readers that their needs, wants and desires will
change over time – for example, “being ready means different things to
different people, and the first question to ask is, What does it mean to me at this particular time? Your answer to
this question can, and should, evolve over time.”

Elliott tries hard to
provide practical solutions for post-breakup people, approaches to move life
forward after analyzing what went wrong in the past. But not everyone will find
her suggestions comfortable outside a protective therapeutic environment. For
example, she recommends creating a sexual inventory that includes seven stages
of recollection and analysis. Just one of them is: “For your last partner,
write about any sexual act you performed that made you uncomfortable. Think
back on other partners and list all such experiences.” Clearly some people,
based partly on their age and partly on how outgoing and/or familiar with
therapy they are, will find this sort of written self-inventory, sexual or
otherwise, more comfortable and useful than others will. Also, Getting Back Out There is so filled with
“sometimes” and “it’s okay” statements that readers seeking any sort of overt guidance
will not find it here: Elliott’s whole point is to guide yourself to new relationships (or a new relationship), and that is a laudable goal. But it is not
nearly as easy to reach in a careful and systematic way as Elliott suggests.
For instance, she briefly discusses “emotional unavailability in both men and
women” and can only say, “If you’re hanging in there with someone who has
commitment issues, revisit your life inventory to see if this is a pattern and
decide if it needs to change.” She does discuss the possibility of giving a
commitment-phobe an ultimatum, but this gets confusing when she says “do not
deliver one if you’re not ready to act” and also says “don’t deliver an
ultimatum that is merely a line in the sand.”

Elliott deserves credit for
tackling so many issues involved in post-breakup life and for handling them in
a plainspoken way. Her repeated advice to “accept it, change it, or leave”
certainly makes theoretical sense, however difficult it can be to implement
while in the throes of a relationship. Her willingness to discuss everything
from specific sexual issues to the right time to introduce children to a new
partner is admirable. On balance, her statement that “this is a different kind
of dating book” is accurate, and Getting
Back Out There is a useful counterbalance to more-superficial books about
dating and mating. Its heavy reliance on self-knowledge and self-exploration,
however, makes it more difficult to read, and its suggestions more difficult to
implement, than Elliott acknowledges. There is, after all, a reason that so
many people with personal difficulties and confusions, including
relationship-oriented ones, seek professional counseling instead of trying to
figure things out entirely on their own.

Different composers have
looked for very different things when creating symphonies. Schubert largely
explored the intricacies of orchestration and some new methods of handling key
relationships and formal structure in his first six symphonies – although it is
a mistake to consider all six as a group, since they have strong individual
characters, such as the Mozartean chamber-like delicacy of No. 5 and the considerable
influence of Rossini in No. 6. After his first six symphonic works, written
between 1813 (when the composer was just 16) and 1818, Schubert dithered about
quite a bit while trying to figure out what he wanted to do with symphonic form
and what it would best express for him. His very rarely performed Symphony No.
7 in E, which exists in short score but of which only 110 bars were orchestrated,
is larger-scale and reaches for far broader expressiveness than his earlier
works. It clearly marks a transition to the world of the “Unfinished” and
“Great C Major” symphonies, which, however, are sometimes given the numbers 7
and 8 (as indeed they are in the new Tudor recording of the cycle) – as if the
E major work did not exist. Actually, the better numbers for the latest
symphonies are 8 and 9, even though this points up the glaring gap in Schubert
symphonic recordings – because the “Unfinished” did not spring from nowhere and
mark a dramatic departure for Schubert; rather, it was a leap forward from the
platform of Symphony No. 7 in E. Jonathan Nott’s recordings of the Schubert
symphonies date to 2003, except for his reading of No. 9, which is from 2006.
All the performances show the ever-versatile Bamberger Symphoniker at its usual
best: the early symphonies are fleet, bright, wearing their heritage of Haydn
and Mozart (with hints of Beethoven, notably in No. 4) to very good effect.
Even when Nott overdoes tempos here and there, as in pushing the third movement
of No. 1 or keeping the finale of No. 5 and first part of the finale of No. 6 unusually
slow, the orchestra never flags or becomes ragged, and its sound fits the music
like the proverbial glove. In the final two symphonies, Nott, who is especially
skilled with the intricacies of large-scale symphonic music (Mahler’s, for
example), elicits from the orchestra a fullness and intensity beyond what it
shows in the earlier symphonies. The result is a full-bodied “Unfinished” in
which the two completed movements contrast very well in sound and structure
despite the fact that they are essentially in the same tempo (Allegro moderato and Andante con moto). Fascinatingly, Nott
includes after the second movement of this work the first nine bars of the
third movement – the only ones that Schubert scored. There actually exists a
continuation of this movement, up to the Trio, and it has even been recorded
(the nine scored bars turning into piano-only ones afterwards in a memorable
reading by Max Goberman); but just hearing the nine scored bars under Nott is
enough to make listeners who know this highly familiar music wonder, or wonder
yet again, where Schubert might have taken the symphony – or whether he considered
it actually finished in its two-movement form. Nott’s recording concludes with
a truly monumental performance of the “Great C Major,” a work in which what
Schubert was seeking was clear: he wanted to move the symphony beyond
Beethoven, and he certainly did so in this very long, towering work (which
lasts over an hour in Nott’s rendition, which – happily – takes all the repeats).
It was this symphony that was so influential on later creators of gigantic
symphonic works, notably Bruckner, and Nott gives the music plenty of
opportunity to open up, expand and fill listeners’ ears and minds. Nothing
drags, but everything gets lots of time to develop and sound out in the
uniquely Schubertian mixture of forward drive and leisurely flowing thematic
beauty. Schubert left so many pieces of symphonies strewn about that it is
uncertain whether he ever found everything he sought from the medium – but in
his final symphony, he certainly did find the beginning of a path to the future
of symphonic music.

What Saint-Saëns sought in his third numbered symphony
(he wrote five in all, two being unnumbered and unpublished) was made clear by
the composer himself: he wanted to expand the use of instruments in the
orchestra by including both an organ and a piano (played both two-hands and
four-hands) within the usual complement of orchestral instruments. Neither
keyboard instrument dominates the symphony; indeed, despite the “Organ”
subtitle (Saint-Saëns actually
said “with organ”), the organ enters only in the second movement and appears
only there and in the finale – although because of the work’s innovative
structure (the four movements are grouped into two sets of two), the use of
both organ and piano is structurally significant throughout. Written in 1886
and dedicated to Liszt, who died shortly before the symphony’s première, this piece uses many Lisztian
techniques, including the movement grouping and the evolution throughout the
symphony of a cyclic theme. Even the inclusion of the organ recalls Liszt’s
instrumentation of the symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht
(“The Battle of the Huns”). However, Saint-Saëns’ symphony flows in a way recognizably that of its composer,
and it is this flow that Leonard Slatkin and the Orchestre National de Lyon
bring out particularly well in a new Naxos recording. The fine organ work by
Vincent Warnier fits the overall mood of the symphony well, ringing forth when
called for and remaining in the background as part of the ensemble elsewhere.
In all, this is a highly effective performance of a symphony that is quite
different from the composer’s other four and that also differs significantly
from most symphonic works of its time. The organ gets greater prominence in Cyprès et Lauriers, a much-less-known
Saint-Saëns piece written quite
late in the composer’s life, in 1919. This is a work lamenting the losses of
World War I in its first movement and celebrating the Allies’ triumph in its
second – all in the context of something like a concertino for organ and
orchestra, with the organ assuming greater prominence here than in Symphony No.
3. Warnier is front-and-center here in a way that he is not in the symphony,
encouraged to dominate the music and doing so with forthright strength. He
plays an organ with a variegated history: it was originally one of the great
Cavaillé-Coll instruments,
built in 1878; it was reconstructed in 1939 in a new location; then it was
moved again, this time to the Lyon Auditorium, in 1977, where it was restored
in 2013. Much changed and expanded through its various incarnations, the organ
shows its full capabilities in Danse
macabre, whose 1874 original was transcribed for organ in 1919 by Edward
Lemare – the result being a version that Warnier himself took up and redid in
2004 to showcase the capabilities of the Lyon Auditorium organ, which indeed
sounds enormously impressive in this tour
de force.

The organ seems particularly
well-suited not only to Danse macabre
but also to the Dies irae, which
Saint-Saëns both uses and
parodies in his Symphony No. 3. The Dies
irae did not obsess the French composer, however: he merely used it as one
important thematic element. It did, on the other hand, become an obsession of
Rachmaninoff, in whose Symphony No. 1 (1893-95) it is prominent – as it was to
be in many of the composer’s later works. This is the symphony whose failure at
its première was so serious
that it precipitated a mental collapse that made it nearly impossible for
Rachmaninoff to continue composing until after he was treated for three years
by Nikolai Dahl using the then-new techniques of psychotherapy. The symphony is
somewhat cruder than Rachmaninoff’s two later ones, but it does not deserve its
comparative neglect: it shares the other symphonies’ power and passion as well
as their orchestral sound. The Gürzenich-Orchester
Köln under Dmitrij Kitajenko
pulls out all the stops – an organ metaphor, though this symphony does not use
that instrument (although it does include snare drum, tam-tam, tambourine and
bass drum). The result of Kitajenko’s care and intensity is a performance that
shows the composer’s developing musical personality while also tying the
symphony clearly to Tchaikovsky, whose Manfred
Symphony Rachmaninoff had transcribed for piano duet in 1894.
Rachmaninoff’s First does ramble and meander somewhat, but it has considerable
power from its opening bars and evinces a sureness of orchestration that shows
just how capably the composer, then in his early 20s, could already manage a
large ensemble. The work is paired on this new Oehms CD with The Rock, an even earlier piece (1893)
and an even more Tchaikovskian one. Rachmaninoff actually played The Rock on piano for Tchaikovsky and
others, and the older composer had asked to include it in a European concert
tour that did not occur because of Tchaikovsky’s death. It is easy to see why
Tchaikovsky took to this atmospheric work, which draws scenically both on the
poetic notion of a cloud resting upon a rock and on a Chekhov story in which a
young girl hears an older man’s life story during a blizzard. Rachmaninoff
shows himself here to be an adept tone-painter, and Kitajenko fully explores
the coloristic aspects of the score while allowing it to flow freely through
its several moods. Kitajenko recently completed an excellent Tchaikovsky
symphonic cycle and now seems poised to do an equally fine job with the
Rachmaninoff symphonies and other orchestral works.

The most consistently
tuneful of all Franz Lehár’s
operettas, Der Graf von Luxemburg was
the last to be completed: Lehár
added the final element of the music, the third-act aria for Gräfin Stasa Kokozow, in 1937, three
years after finishing his final stage work, Giuditta.
The original version of Der Graf von
Luxemburg dates to 1909 and was highly popular in its time, when it was the
composer’s first major hit after The
Merry Widow (1905). The huge continuing success of the earlier operetta has
left Der Graf von Luxemburg largely
in obscurity in much of the theatrical world, although it remains popular in
Germany. Listeners discovering it for the first time are in for an enormous
treat, because there is not a single less-than-inspired tune in the work, and
it is wonderfully balanced between a serious romance and a lighthearted one
that provides plenty of opportunities for amusing ditties and marvelously
ear-catching dance tunes – including several of Lehár’s sensual, swooning and emotionally gripping waltzes.

There exists, believe it or
not, an original-cast recording of Der
Graf von Luxemburg: excerpts released by Deutsche Grammophon in 1909,
conducted by the composer. For the full work in a modern recording, the very
best performance dates to 1968, with Willy Mattes conducting the Bavarian State
Opera Chorus and Graunke Symphony Orchestra, and a stellar cast led by a
sure-voiced and emotionally involved Nicolai Gedda and including Lucia Popp, Renate
Holm, Willi Brokmeier, Kurt Böhme and Gisela Litz. The new CPO performance is
not at this level, but it is a fine one nevertheless, providing a chance to
hear some up-and-coming singers and discover, or hear once again, just how well
Der Graf von Luxemburg stands the
test of time. The work actually needs little updating to appeal to a modern
audience. The principal change that an enterprising modern director should make
is to bring to the fore the sexually charged subtext that explains the two main
characters’ motivations. This means showing René, the title character (Marco Vassalli in the new recording), as
a wastrel who has not only squandered his family’s money and honor but has also
indulged in a long series of meaningless affairs. The opera singer Angèle (Astrid Kessler), for her part,
needs to be shown not as flighty but as world-weary after her many liaisons – thus explaining why she is focused on leaving
the stage and becoming a respectable princess by marrying the much older,
love-besotted Fürst (Prince) Basil
Basilowitsch (Mark Hamman). This approach would fully explain why – when René and Angèle have their sham marriage so that she can attain the noble
rank required for her to marry Basil after divorcing the “marriage Count” – the
two suddenly become thoughtful and inward-focused, showing depths not apparent in
their characters before, as they wonder whether they are allowing the süßer goldige Traum of true love to slip
away forever.

The new recording, whose
singers lack the vocal acting ability of those in the Mattes version, does not
make this subtext clear, so the “sham marriage” changes from amusing to serious
rather too abruptly. But that is a common misstep in recordings and stagings of
Der Graf von Luxemburg. Another issue
here is that Hamman plays Basil very broadly indeed, turning him into an oaf
along the lines of Baron Ochs in Der
Rosenkavalier. This is a justifiable interpretation but not a particularly
appealing one, since it transforms Angèle
into a pure gold-digger (a role which she certainly does fill in part) and
makes her plan to marry Basil seem even less upstanding than it is. On the
other hand, Hamman’s approach makes for some easy laughs – at least for those
who can follow the German dialogue, since CPO once again provides no libretto
and only the barest, very inadequate plot synopsis.

The second couple in Der Graf von Luxemburg does not serve a
parallel role to that of the first, as Camille and Valenciennes do for Danilo
and Hanna in The Merry Widow. Instead,
Armand (Daniel Wagner) and Juliette (Marie-Christine Haase) live a life that is
more carefree (despite Juliette’s newfound longing for the respectability of
marriage) and more overtly Bohemian, encapsulated by the ditty Wir bummeln durch’s Leben, was schert uns
das Ziel (“We wander through life, and ‘who cares?’ is our goal”) – which
is brought back at the operetta’s conclusion to send the audience home in the
most festive of moods. Wagner’s voice is barely adequate for his part, but the rest
of the soloists handle their music very well, if at times a trifle shakily. Eva
Schneidereit, whose role as dea ex machina
in the third act makes the happy conclusion possible, deserves special mention
for her combination of battle-axe intensity and misplaced girlishness. The
chorus and orchestra are just fine: Daniel Inbal, who emphasizes the many leitmotif uses that knit Der Graf von Luxemburg together so well,
keeps the whole production moving smartly along – as, indeed, it practically does
on its own because of the wealth of wonderful tunes that tumble over each other
from start to finish. This is an extraordinary operetta, and although the
performance here is not quite at the highest level, it serves the music very
well and will be a revelation for listeners who think The Merry Widow, because of its wholly deserved enormous popularity,
must perforce contain the very best musical writing of which Lehár was capable.

A wonderful, much-simplified
retelling of one of the great stories of the American Revolution, Mara
Rockliff’s Gingerbread for Liberty!
contains so many improbable events that it reads like pure fiction – all the more
so because of the highly innovative cut-paper illustrations by Vincent X.
Kirsch, which give the whole book the sheen of a fairy tale. Yet the book hews
remarkably closely to fact in its tale of a German-born American colonist who
so loved his adopted country that he volunteered to fight for independence when
he was 55 years old – only to be turned down as a fighter and asked instead to
ply his trade as a baker to feed the hungry Continental Army. Yes, as the book
says, Christopher Ludwick (or Ludwig) really did induce Hessian mercenaries,
fighting for the British, to desert and join the American side – where they
would be well-fed and have a chance to settle in Philadelphia, as Ludwick had,
and make better lives for themselves. Yes, he did go behind enemy lines to
persuade Hessians to defect. After the war ended, he did bake 6,000 pounds of
bread to feed the defeated Redcoats. Besides all that, what did not even fit
into Rockliff’s book was his marriage to an Indian princess (his wife gets only
a brief mention); George Washington’s gift of a handwritten certificate of good
conduct to a man Washington called “my honest friend”; and Ludwick’s tireless
efforts after the war to help the poor, sick, and others in need. Even without
those elements, this book is packed with fascination. Ludwick really did make a
fortune as a gingerbread baker and confectioner in Philadelphia. He really did
sneak into a Hessian camp (on Staten Island, New York) and persuade some
mercenaries to desert and move to Philadelphia. And he really was on good and
personal terms with Washington. Even the fanciful elements of the book make
sense: Rockliff imagines Ludwick rowing to a Hessian camp while thinking the
German words for “revolution,” “independence” and “liberty” – and he likely did
something very much of that sort. She imagines that he may have made
gingerbread as well as ordinary bread for Cornwallis’ troops – and while no one
knows if he did, he was, after all, known as an excellent gingerbread maker, so
this is possible. The story has a wealth of information told with a wealth of
humor – for example, the illustration of very tall and very lean Hessians
bending eagerly toward the short, plump, moon-lit figure of Ludwick is an
especially amusing image. The book has fine bonuses, too, including an author’s
note that gives additional information on Ludwick, and a recipe for gingerbread
cookies that may not be 18th-century-authentic but that can be a lot
of fun for young readers and their families to try.

The deliciousness is of a
different sort – a rather bittersweet one – in Mary Lyn Ray’s A Violin for Elva, a story about wishes
that eventually come true when it is almost (but, luckily, not quite) too late.
Elva is a little girl who hears music in her head and wants a violin so she can
make more of it. But her parents, for reasons that are not very clear, refuse
to get her one (kids who read the book are likely to ask why not, and since Ray
does not explain, adult readers should consider possible scenarios). So Elva,
instead of asking for an instrument again, simply pretends she has one,
“performing” with sports equipment, her toothbrush and anything else she can
get her hands on, “playing music only she could hear.” Her parents never reappear
after their refusal to get Elva a violin, so their reaction to all this is
unknown. Instead, Ray traces Elva quickly from childhood to adulthood, when she
has “appointments and important meetings” but still longs for a violin. Elva
regales herself with recorded music (today’s parents may have to explain vinyl
records to today’s kids) and talks with her dog to keep herself in touch with
something other than her own feelings (she lives alone and certainly does not
look happy in Tricia Tusa’s illustrations). Eventually, after deciding it is
never too late to indulge in a childhood dream, Elva buys herself a violin –
and soon finds that it is far from easy to play. Despite her determination to
learn on her own, she is disappointed again and again – until she finally gets
up the courage to buy lessons from a violin teacher. And then she does learn to
play – maybe not exceptionally well, but well enough to fulfill her childhood
wish. The picture of the teacher’s students playing together – all of them young
children except for adult Elva – is the most touching in the book, and rather
sad as well for what it says about all the years Elva lost. But it is not the
final picture – indeed, the one just afterwards, illustrating the words, “Elva
was making music,” is as joyous as can be, showing Elva completely captured and
enraptured by her own ability to play the violin at last. This is a sweetly
meant book that is less immediately uplifting than are most picture books for
young readers. The front and back covers show sheet-music excerpts from
Mozart’s well-known serenade, Eine Kleine
Nachtmusik (“A Little Night Music”), and in a sense, that is what A Violin for Elva is about: the chance
to make music after so many years, before night ultimately falls on one’s life.
This is a more-thoughtful, more-cautionary message than is typical in
children’s books, a fact to which parents should be sensitive – especially if
their kids, like Elva, ask to play a musical instrument when they are young
enough to have many decades of enjoyment ahead of themselves.

Here are two paperback
reissues that give readers a chance to consider anew some interesting factual
and fictional works – or encounter the material for the first time. The Polar Bear Scientists, originally published
in 2012 in the “Scientists in the Field” series, is built around interviews
with biologist Steven Amstrup, “the godfather of Alaskan polar bear research
for the past thirty years.” Amstrup talks not only about climate change, for
which the polar bear has become a sort of poster child, but also about the
history of studies of the largest bears in the world, the
capture-release-and-recapture program that makes modern scientific study of
them possible, the use of radio collars to track bears that move between polar
nations, and more. Other scientists and support personnel, such as George
Durner and Kristin Simac, discuss the bears as well, and all are seen with
bears, with the equipment used to catch and track them, and in the laboratory
and office settings where data are entered, assembled and correlated. Peter
Lourie’s words and photos clearly depict the difficult conditions under which
scientists work with the bears – and the frigid land where the bears thrive, or
try to. Some photos tell the story in ways that are more immediately dramatic than
the text: a female with three cubs trying to scare off the scientists’
helicopter, a bear print that is elevated because Arctic winds have blown away
the lighter surrounding snow, a female bear lying in snow as a scientist
prepares gear to weigh and measure her, yearling male bears roughhousing, and
of course some adorable cubs. The sorts of decisions the scientists face are
clearly explained.A missing collar, for
example, needs to be located if at all possible. “Of course it’s expensive to
go find a distant collar, with the cost of fuel and time, but it’s equally if
not more important to find a collar in order to determine whether a bear has
died or has just dropped it.” A photo showing scientists with pickaxes trying
to break through ice to dig up a collar gives some idea of what is involved in
retrieval. The Polar Bear Scientists
tells as much about the people who study these bears as it does about the bears
themselves: the humans are concerned, dedicated and meticulous in their work. The
global-warming debate has continued since this book’s original publication,
driven more by political considerations than by hard science – but Amstrup puts
it into perspective after Lourie points out that the bears have gone through at
least two periods that were warmer than the current one. In those earlier warm
periods, says Amstrup, “we didn’t have nearly as many humans out there
competing with bears and otherwise affecting their security. …[A]s temperatures
rise and habitat is reduced, polar bears are going to be competing with a lot
of human uses of their environment.”The
scientists’ worry comes through not as agenda-motivated but as genuine,
well-intentioned and transcending politics.

The intentions are certainly
good as well in Blue Balliett’s Hold
Fast, a novel first published in 2013. But aside from first and last
sections called “Ice,” this book has nothing in common with the study of polar
bears. It is instead a study of people, in a cold city that is nevertheless
warmer than the bears’ Arctic habitat: Chicago. Balliett’s (+++) book is
somewhat too enamored of its own cleverness – for example, aside from the “Ice”
parts, the book contains 12 sections that all have “C” titles (“Click,”
“Crash,” “Cling,” “Clutch,” and so forth), with each word defined in several
ways before each section begins. As in her earlier books, Balliett looks into
the past for elements of this one, which springs from a major diamond heist in
2003. But unlike her prior novels, which at their best were fascinatingly
art-focused, Hold Fast is essentially
the simple story of a family sundered and eventually reunited. Balliett uses
the story as a framework for advocating, in a passing and rather simplistic
way, various causes; for example, she writes, in a note about homelessness at
the book’s end, that the solution to this major societal issue is a simple
matter of matching those without houses to abandoned and foreclosed buildings –
a “solution” whose overwhelming naïveté is less than charming. The book itself
does have charm, though, even if it comes across as somewhat too contrived. The
basic family unit consists of Dashel (Dash) Pearl; his wife, Summer; son,
Jubilation (Jubie); and daughter, Early, the book’s protagonist. The mystery
here emerges quickly, as Dash tosses out some apparently unimportant (but
perhaps crucial) number problems from a poem by Langston Hughes, and shortly
thereafter vanishes mysteriously, leaving behind a notebook containing various
numbers and a final line, “Must research number rhythms.” The disappearance,
the notebook and Hughes are all recurring themes, along with the issues of what
a home really is, what homelessness means to those who experience or fear
experiencing it, and how people make it through extremely difficult times.
Balliett goes out of her way to show how wonderful homeless-shelter operators
and volunteers are: “If one of you gets sick, we’ll connect you with medical
care. Chicago HOPES, a wonderful after-school tutoring organization, keeps a
room here with books and games in it, a place to get homework help and some
one-on-one attention.” And so on. The good guys here are so good – and the bad
ones so bad – that Hold Fast is more
unidimensional than Balliett’s other books; and the ongoing advocacy, however
well-meant and justifiable based on Balliett’s sociopolitical views, gives the
book more of a pamphlet’s stridency than is really good for it.The characters become types more than fully
formed individuals as a result, and while they endure and overcome hardship,
and Balliett pulls the plot strands together expertly, the overall feeling of
this book is that it has a point to make rather than a story to tell. Hold Fast is well written, but its
narrative is ultimately the victim of its author’s good intentions.

Living Candida-Free: 100 Recipes
and a 3-Stage Program to Restore Your Health and Vitality—Conquer the Hidden
Epidemic That’s Making You Sick. By Ricki Heller, PhD, RHN, with Andrea
Nakayama, CNC, CNE. Da Capo. $18.99.

Nowadays diet is the source
of all evil and, at the same time, the source of all that is good – provided
you obey rules, restrictions and approaches set down by whatever dietary leader
and set of instructions you choose to follow. The fact that this makes food
consumption seem a lot like religion is no accident: in both fields, people
with certain beliefs are convinced that they have the only correct solution to
all the ills of humanity and that if only everyone would do what they do, everyone would be better for
it.

Thankfully, dietary
conflicts have not risen to the level of religious ones, but there is certainly
plenty of angst and anger to be had in groups that include individuals who are
omnivores, others who are vegans, others following the Mediterranean or paleo
prescription, others eating gluten-free – you get the idea. In so fractured a
field, it is no surprise that various people professing (or demonstrating)
various degrees of expertise cannot wait to showcase their knowledge and recommendations
to the like-minded – which does not mean that anyone who is not a member of
that particular congregation will be converted by any of these all-knowing
tomes.

And so we have Ricki
Heller’s Living Candida-Free, which
seeks to solve a problem that most people who chug along treating food as fuel
probably never knew existed. This is the proliferation of candida yeast, a
normal part of the digestive tract that can sometimes grow out of control and
be responsible, Heller argues, for everything from digestive dysfunction to
chronic fatigue. The science here is murky, to say the least, but people who
have been told to watch out for candida, or those who have had candida
infections (which are nothing to sneer at: candida is the world’s most-common
cause of fungal infections), will surely want to give this book at least a
once-over. Heller, an associate editor of Simply
Gluten-Free magazine (assisted in this book by nutritionist Andrea
Nakayama), follows a familiar dietary-advice arc: explain the problem
(“Candida-Related Complex”); offer an upbeat solution to it (“Rebalancing Your
Body Through Food and Lifestyle”); include easy-to-understand acronyms (“ACD”
for “anti-candida diet”); show how to set up your food-preparation area to take
advantage of the recommendations being presented (“Your ACD Pantry and
Ingredient Substitutions”); and provide a variety of recipes that those
committed to your particular dietary approach can follow.

Living Candida-Free does all of the
above, and also offers 16 pages of color photos showing just how appetizing the
foods in the book can be. This is a somewhat mixed blessing, though, since the
“Perfect Golden Gravy” on one page looks much like plastic, while there is a
strong appearance contrast between the “Mojito Smoothie” (looks good) and
“Smooth Operator Smoothie” (unappealing) shown in the same photo. Still, Heller
deserves credit for not only providing recipes but also showing readers how
they ought to look when followed. Readers who find the entire color-photo section
delicious-looking will actually be prime candidates for buying the book and
following its instructions.

As for the recipes
themselves, they range from the typical staples of non-traditional food
preparation (“Basic Chia Pudding,” “Meaty Crumbles,” “Homemade Ketchup”) to
soups, snacks, sides, sandwiches, spreads, salads, sweets, sauces and even some
categories that do not begin with the letter “s,” such as breakfast foods and
main courses. Heller does not pretend that switching to candida-suppressing
food consumption is quick: the first of her three dietary stages lasts two to
three months, and the third is targeted for one year and beyond – after which
there is “long-term maintenance.” She also includes “foods you should really
avoid for the rest of your life,” a list featuring the usual suspects: white
sugar, cane sugar, anything made with refined flour, hydrogenated oils, and –
perhaps a bit surprisingly – “mushrooms, except the occasional medicinal
mushrooms (reishi, chaga, etc.).” Whether anyone actually needs to go on a
lifetime anti-candida diet is another matter: the debunking of various dietary
fads does not undermine the belief in them by people seeking their personal
solutions to whatever problems they think particular foods or food groups can
cause or solve. In this way as in others, dietary preferences take on some
elements of religions: you believe what you believe, and no unbeliever (least
of all one of a scientific or otherwise insufficiently faith-oriented bent) is
going to convince you otherwise.

Surely there are some people
for whom candida proliferation really is a significant health issue. Surely
there are others whose symptoms approximate those that Heller here attributes
to too much candida: the symptoms are common to many forms of bodily malaise.
So some people looking for a non-medical answer to their physical condition
will likely accept Heller’s assertions about candida and how to reduce it, and
thus will find this an important book. And given the realities of the placebo
effect (the condition of about 30% of people improves even when they are given
nonfunctional treatments), it is certain that some people will benefit from Living Candida-Free. Whether many people should stay up at night
worrying about ways in which their lives would be turned around if only their
bodies contained less candida is another matter altogether – specifically, a
matter of faith, or the lack thereof.

Surveys of the complete
works of composers, or of their complete music for particular instruments, are
becoming increasingly common – and have proved very worthwhile for
understanding how a composer developed, from what roots and into what branches
and what sort of flowering over time. These surveys are not necessarily of interest
to all listeners, though, since they inevitably contain works of varying importance
and quality: even recordings of, say, the complete symphonies of Mozart or
Haydn will showcase works of lesser inspiration alongside those of undoubted
brilliance. Still, for understanding a well-known composer or being introduced
to a less-known one, a “complete” recording of one sort or another can be most
welcome. This is especially true when the performances are as fine as are those
in all these new releases. The Minguet Quartet is simply wonderful in its
recording of the quartet music of Josef Suk (1874-1935), who is generally
remembered more as a violinist and for his relationship with Dvořák and Brahms than for his
compositions. It turns out that Suk progressed significantly in his musical
conceptions over time, starting out in a typical late-Romantic idiom but
eventually producing a quartet so modern in its musical language that it caused
something of a furor in Berlin in 1912 – earning the composer comparisons, not
by any means always complimentary, to Schoenberg. Suk had a habit of revising
and reconsidering his earlier works in light of his later interests, a fact
that sometimes resulted in rather odd hybrids. His String Quartet No. 1 in B-flat, op. 11, for example, dates to 1896,
and it is well-made and lies well on the instruments, featuring a finale with a
recurring three-note motto that sounds like nothing less than Shostakovich. But
some two decades later, Suk decided this finale did not work, so he created a
new one in which – among other things – the motto becomes more prominent, the
overall structure becomes far more dissonant, and the movement’s length is 50%
longer. This new movement, presented here as Quartet movement in B-flat, really does not fit the quartet at all,
but it is fascinating evidence of Suk’s later thinking about the quartet
medium. That thinking is even more in evidence in the notorious String Quartet No. 2, op. 31, which has
no specific home key and does indeed sound like something out of Schoenberg
even though it does not adhere rigidly to twelve-tone or any other specific
systemic structural device. It certainly fits with the time in which it was
written: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
was first performed in 1913, the year after the première of Suk’s quartet. The remaining works on this very
well-recorded CPO release may be of lesser importance, but they have charms of
their own. The early Piano Quintet in G
minor, op. 8 lies firmly within late Romanticism, being fleet and pleasant
and thoroughly enjoyable to hear, with the piano generally subsumed within the
totality of the ensemble but asserting itself at a variety of appropriate
places – especially in the rollicking Scherzo,
whose opening would not be out of place in a work by Saint-Saëns. The other four pieces here are
short and not especially significant, but are included for the sake of the
completeness for which this release is designed. They are a Menuet in G, a warmly affecting Ballade in D minor, a brief Barkarole in D minor, and the thoughtful
Meditace na Starocesky Choral, Op. 35a
(“Meditation on the old Bohemian Hymn ‘St. Wenceslas’”). All are played with
assured warmth and a fine understanding of Suk’s place in Czech music and the
rising Czech national consciousness during his lifetime – the result being a
release that provides valuable insight into some fine music by a neglected
composer.

Also important for
nationalistic reasons and also comparatively little-known outside his native
land, Federico Moreno Torroba (1891-1982) was as important for his use and
understanding of Spanish folk music in the context of classical composition as
was Ástor Piazzolla for his adaptation of the Argentine tango to
the classical milieu. The first of three planned Naxos CDs that will collectively
include all of Torroba’s guitar concertos offers an exceptionally well-played
combination of concerto music with works written for guitar solo. Each of the
two guitarists plays one work of each type. Pepe Romero, world-renowned for his
flamenco performances, brings forth all the color, virtuosity and drama of
Torroba’s Concierto en Flamenco and
is also heard in a suite of music focusing on the central Spanish region best
known for the fictional Don Quixote, Aires
de La Mancha. This set of five short movements mixes dances with musical
visions of the area’s geography, and Romero plays it with assurance, warmth and
a strong feeling for local color. The similarly evocative, much earlier
three-movement solo-guitar Suite
castellana, which includes the Danza
that was Torroba’s first-ever guitar composition, also gets a sure-handed and understanding
reading, in this case from Vicente Coves. And Coves shows himself a very fine
classical soloist in the fascinating Diálogos
entre guitarra y orquesta, which plays off the guitar against harp and
celesta as well as the usual orchestral instruments, producing an extended
concerto-like work that is playful, colorful, highly evocative of Spain and its
folk music, and altogether winning. The Málaga Philharmonic Orchestra under Manuel Coves provides very
fine support in the two concertos. Listeners unacquainted with Torroba’s music
will find this disc a first-rate introduction to it.

The music of Bach, unlike
that of Suk and Torroba, is exceedingly well-known, and is also exceedingly
extensive: recordings of Bach’s complete works range from 155 to 172 CDs. The
Bach cantatas alone take up more than 50 discs – and have been recorded as a
cycle several times. This has not stopped new groups from producing new versions
of the music, however, nor has it interfered with the creation of entirely new
recording labels devoted to Bach’s music. J.S. Bach-Stiftung, founded in 2011,
is one such. Based in Switzerland, it is a subsidiary of the J.S. Bach
Foundation and is engaged in a 25-year project to release live recordings of
Bach’s complete vocal music, using period instruments and authentic (which is
to say small) vocal forces. On the basis of the three works on the label’s
first CD of Bach cantatas, this will be a top-notch series of releases. The
sound is warm and complements the intimately scaled performances beautifully.
The singing and playing are historically informed and manage to be “correct”
without sounding at all stilted: there is genuine involvement of the performers
in the music. There does not seem to be any particular rationale for the order
of the cantatas presented, indicating that these releases are really targeting
listeners who want the cantatas as a complete set without regard to chronology
or the specific religious occasions for which the works were created. Thus, BWV
182, Himmelskönig, sei willkommen,
was written for Palm Sunday; BWV 81 – Jesus
schläft, was soll ich hoffen? – is for the fourth Sunday after
Epiphany; and BWV 129, Gelobet sei der
Herr, mein Gott, is for the first Sunday after Pentecost. All are sung and
played here with solemnity and liturgical understanding, but without
heavy-handedness; the organ parts are especially noteworthy, coming through
clearly in the finely managed sonic landscape and within the small instrumental
forces. Not all listeners will be willing to wait years for the full set of
releases from J.S. Bach-Stiftung, but those who have wanted to build a
collection of the Bach cantatas gradually will find this project highly attractive
and a worthwhile alternative to existing recordings of the full set of these works,
which were so very central to Bach’s life and his music.

The live recording of Andris
Nelsons leading the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer seems
designed to test a truism: if Italian opera is primarily concerned with the
voice and French opera balances vocal and instrumental elements, in German
opera the orchestra is paramount. Like many clichés, this one arose because it
contains a germ of truth, and perhaps more than a germ. Certainly in much of
Wagner, the orchestra, pervaded by leitmotif
after leitmotif, is as much a part of
the stage action as any of the singers. But there are limits to the
effectiveness of seeing Wagner through a primarily instrumental lens, and this
recording shows what they are. Like other great art, Der Fliegende Holländer has inspired multiple interpretations
and has stood up to just about all of them. One particularly intriguing one
treated the whole opera as a sort of “fever dream” of an unbalanced Senta,
ending in her suicide. This is certainly not what Wagner intended, but the
approach did solve some problems, such as the fact that everyone in the opera
knows exactly what the Flying Dutchman’s ship looks like, but when the ship
appears in reality, absolutely no one knows what it is; and the Dutchman’s
portrait is prominently displayed in Senta’s home, but when the man himself –
exactly matching the picture – shows up, no one but Senta recognizes him,
either. Opera is not renowned for logic, but Wagner, here as elsewhere acting
as his own librettist, surely knew of these plot inconsistencies, deeming them
insignificant next to what he was trying to say about the redemptive power of
love – his preoccupation for virtually everything he was to write after this
opera, his fourth.

In Der Fliegende Holländer, the Dutchman is intended
to come across as a sort of force of nature – certainly his Satanic sentence to
roam the seas unceasingly, bringing all his unfaithful brides to eternal
damnation, seems disproportionate to his “crime” of steadfastly refusing to be
stopped by weather from rounding a cape. The Dutchman is, as a human, a
tormented soul; this balances his supernatural presence. Unfortunately, in this
RCO Live recording, Terje Stensvold gives us a Dutchman who is neither
particularly otherworldly nor particularly human. His voice is barely up to the
part – in his first appearance, in particular, it is weak and shaky – and he
never achieves the rumbling drama of a true bass-baritone, perhaps because he
is not one: he is really a baritone, and a comparatively light one, at that. This
leaves the much-deeper-voiced Kwangchul Youn, as Daland, to dominate the men’s
meeting in Act I (Wagner wanted Der
Fliegende Holländer played straight through, but most performances divide
it into three acts, as this one does). Yet Daland is supposed to be a
superficial character concerned strictly with worldly goods – a good, reliable
ship’s captain, but not a deep thinker and not much of a father, hesitating not
at all to promise his daughter to a just-met stranger for the sake of wealth.
The strongest voice and characterization in this recording are those of Anja
Kampe as Senta: her handling of the ballad describing the Dutchman’s hubris and his fate is highly affecting,
and her final scene is as dramatic as it can be – in contrast with the
Dutchman’s rather pallid revelation to all (at last) of who he is. Better than
all the soloists, though, are the three combined choruses – the wonderful scene
in which Daland’s sailors taunt and then are taunted by those of the Dutchman
is effectively spooky here – and the orchestra, which plays with smoothness,
excellent sectional balance and considerable power. The positioning of
microphones for this live recording could partly explain the comparative
weakness of the soloists’ voices, especially Stensvold’s, but the audio of the
choruses and orchestra is very good indeed, perhaps reflecting what seems to be
Nelsons’ concern to focus the performance on the instrumental elements rather
than the vocals. In all, this is a reasonably good, very-well-played reading
that gives short shrift to characterization and vocal storytelling while
placing choral and instrumental elements front and center throughout. Like its
title character, though, it is pale (the Dutchman, both in his portrait and as
a person, is described as den bleichen
Mann); and while it has many effective elements – and, thankfully, includes
a full libretto – it is simply not as involving or emotionally trenchant as Der Fliegende Holländer is capable of
being.

The emotional impact of
Mozart’s Requiem is certainly high in
a new BIS recording featuring the Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki.
But this release seeks to be more than an effective presentation of Mozart’s
unfinished masterpiece: it wants to be a reconsideration. This is not the
familiar (and familiarly flawed) completion of the Requiem by Franz Xaver Süßmayr
but an altogether new version put together by Masato Suzuki, son of the
conductor and a member of Bach Collegium Japan. The younger Suzuki uses a
combination of Süßmayr’s work
with that of Joseph Eybler (1765-1846), the friend of Mozart who was first
asked by the composer’s widow to complete the Requiem but was unable to do so – leading to Constanze’s selection
of Süßmayr, whose work Mozart
did not respect (he liked and admired Eybler’s).Add in some material from Masato Suzuki himself and you have the Requiem as heard here. It would be
unfair to say that all this is much ado about nothing – it is, in fact, much
ado about something very important, for the Requiem
is magnificent music left incomplete, and any and all thoughtful attempts to
turn it into a fully integrated work are most welcome. However, it is worth
pointing out that, just as non-specialists are unlikely to hear the flaws in Süßmayr’s work (technical errors,
unnecessary doublings of voices, and some generally uninspired writing), so
they are unlikely to perceive significant improvements in what Masato Suzuki
has done. There have been a number of other attempts to complete Mozart’s Requiem, some being on the radical side
(Duncan Druce), others being considerably more modest in scope (Franz Beyer,
H.C. Robbins Landon), and still others lying somewhere in the middle (Robert
Levin, Richard Maunder). Certainly Masato Suzuki’s work is worthy within this
group of rearrangements (or re-completions), and certainly the performance here
is thoughtful, well-paced and effective. As a rethinking of Mozart’s Requiem, though, neither the new version
nor the new performance breaks significant new ground. The CD also includes a
very fine recording of Vesperae Solennes
de Confessore, which contrasts well with the later Requiem, plus an alternative version of the Tuba mirum from the Sequentia
of the Requiem.

The concept of a Requiem expanded significantly, along
with much else, after Mozart’s time, and there is a richness and opulence to
Gounod’s Requiem in C that make the
work both moving and attractive from a strictly sonic point of view. A new
Carus recording led by Risto Joost, however, forgoes aural splendor and turns
this work into something even smaller and more intimate than what Mozart
produced: the Berlin Radio Choir is accompanied only by organ (played movingly
by Hye-Lin Hur). This is a strange, if interesting, way to hear Gounod’s Requiem, which dates to 1893, more than
a century after Mozart’s. The mysterious commission that led Mozart to write
his Requiem is well-known, but there
is no mystery about Gounod’s inspiration: he wrote his Requiem after the death of his four-year-old grandson, Maurice. It
was to be Gounod’s final work, as Mozart’s was his; but except for some details
on which Gounod was working at the time of his death, his Requiem, unlike Mozart’s, is complete. The intimacy that Gounod’s
work receives when heard as a vocal composition with only organ accompaniment
gives it an even stronger religious orientation and seriousness than it has in
its orchestrated form. Yet this is scarcely a traditional Requiem: it omits the Offertory,
for example, and sets the Introit and
Kyrie together to begin the work. The
atmospheric orchestral opening is lost here, and therefore so is the effect of
the first, hushed choral entry; but the overall sparseness of the performance
makes for a moving recording, if scarcely an authentic one. The disc also
includes a rethought Dvořák Mass in D (1892), heard here with wind
quintet rather than full orchestra. Interestingly, the original version of this
work (dating to 1887) was written for organ accompaniment – but rather than use
that form, Joost offers one featuring flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon.
The solemnity of this wind quintet actually comes across quite well, with the
lower instruments frequently dominating the discourse and giving the work
considerable depth – although never as much as it has in its orchestral version.
The most interesting element of the piece, namely the way the composer combines
then-new harmonic approaches with old church modes, does comes through well in
Joost’s version. And even if this disc as a whole is a bit of a curiosity, it
will be of considerable interest to listeners already familiar with these two
heartfelt works and intrigued by the chance to experience them in previously
unheard forms.

The notion that comics need
to be, well, comic, is a long-outdated one, archaic even before the days of
serious graphic novels and certainly obsolete today. Comics have long been used
to teach serious things through humor
– the early days of Mad magazine and
the Pogo strips by Walt Kelly are
perfect examples, and there are plenty of others. But for many cartoonists in
recent years, humor itself has become secondary or even absent as the artists
have striven to put significant societal issues within the comic-strip medium.
No one has done this better than Patrick McDonnell, an outstanding artist with
vast knowledge of comic-strip history and techniques who has put his
understanding and abilities at the service of multiple animal-related causes –
most notably adoption, but also such environmental issues as habitat
destruction and human predation. True, McDonnell sometimes lets the “cause”
elements crowd out the gentle, amusing one in his Mutts strips, but by and large, he does a superb job of balancing
teaching and advocacy, on the one hand, with warmth and amusement, on the
other. The latest Mutts collection, Living the Dream, showcases McDonnell’s skills
perfectly. Several sequences within the book, which contains a full year of
daily and Sunday strips, are in McDonnell’s now-classic “Shelter Stories”
format, in which big-eyed animals plead winningly and nearly irresistibly with
readers to take them home. Other sequences incorporate meaningful quotations into
art with an animal focus: one Valentine’s Day strip – actually a single panel –
quotes Mother Teresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small
things with great love.” The panel shows a woman reaching lovingly toward a
caged shelter dog that is presumably about to be adopted by her. Elsewhere,
McDonnell mixes erudition with amusement for no apparent reason other than his
ability to do so: in a “Mutts Book Club” series, Mooch the cat reads titles on
which other characters comment. Thus, Mooch says, “A Farewell to Arms,” and a
bird holds up its wings and says “Yup. It’s an evolutionary thing.” In another
sequence, Mooch and his best friend, Earl the dog, discuss the removal of
wolves from the endangered-species list – a heavy matter handled with
considerable delicacy and thoughtful amusement. And then there is the strip in
which birds start to sing, but no notes come out – and one of them explains, “A
song to Rachel Carson.” And yet Mutts
has plenty of room for pure, unadulterated fun. For example, Bip and Bop,
squirrels who perpetually bean other characters with nuts, at one point hit
Alfred E. Newman and comment, “What, me worry?” At another, they hit the Hulk
and say, “It’s clobberin’ time.” And they bonk Spider-Man and aver, “That
should knock some spidey-sense into him.” The perfectly drawn renditions of the
non-McDonnell characters showcase the cartoonist’s tremendous skill, while the
contrast with his own creations enhances a strip in which amusement and
education very easily coexist.

Coexistence is more strained in Garry
Trudeau’s Doonesbury, a strip that
has long since become one focusing more on didactic than entertainment value.
Trudeau is heavy-handed and dogmatic in a way that McDonnell is not – but
Trudeau’s strips, for that very reason, can be remarkably effective in
exploring and explaining societal wrongs that other cartoonists never tackle. Mel’s Story, one of a series of Trudeau books
focused on specific troubling elements of military life, is a case in point.
Its weakest element by far is the one that is not by Trudeau: a politicized and self-serving introduction by
California Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier. Indeed, this poor words-only
opening of the book only serves to show just how much better it is to have a
topic as difficult and complex as that of military sexual assault be handled in
what is essentially graphic-novel form – providing that Trudeau is the one
handling it. The whole book is aftermath – the assault is discussed but not
shown – as Melissa “Mel” Wheeler tries to recover from “command rape,” in which
her brigadier general gives her a choice between a sexual relationship and
being pulled away from duty she loves and at which she excels and placed on the
garbage detail. In the day-to-day sequence of the enormously complex Doonesbury strip, Mel’s story was
intermingled with many other story lines involving different characters –
Trudeau paints on a huge canvas and bounces about constantly (and often
disconcertingly) from topic to topic. In this book, the panels featuring Mel
are gathered in a single place, so her story seems far more focused and urgent
than in newspaper form. We see her trying to cope with what happened to her,
interacting at her military counselor’s office with amputee B.D. – whose
physical wounds Trudeau skillfully balances with Mel’s psychological ones – and
gradually finding her way back to self-respect and a surprising decision to
re-enlist. This part of the book is gripping and dramatic – certainly not
characteristics of old-fashioned comic strips – but the portion afterwards
shows why Trudeau’s politicized thinking is scarcely to all tastes: after Mel
returns to duty, Trudeau moves the story into the next hot-button issue,
involving members of the military being able to declare themselves openly gay. Enough
is never enough for Trudeau, and that is both a strength and a weakness. But in
newspapers, where the “gays coming out” strips were separated from those
involving Mel’s recovery from trauma, the change of focus was not as awkward as
it is here. So if the newspaper format diluted Mel’s story, it made the
transition to Trudeau’s discussion of the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” less
jarring. There is nothing funny in Mel’s
Story, although there is the occasional wry comment or ironic twist.
Trudeau is long past the point of seeing comics as comic: to him they are a
platform, one that he mounts regularly with considerable oratorical and
artistic skill.

After one reads Trudeau, a
foray into lighter fare is often welcome, and of course many comics today
continue in the vein of amusement rather than that of argumentativeness and
intensity. There is still a rich lode of humor to be mined with this
old-fashioned approach, and cartoonists such as Lincoln Peirce extract the fun effectively.
Big Nate, the adventures and mishaps
of an 11-to-12-year-old self-proclaimed sixth-grade genius with a penchant for
creating, yes, comics (as Peirce says he himself did at that age), is a strip
that draws on many traditional cartoon elements but manages to make them seem
fresh and new. Nate is clueless about many things, including his own
cluelessness, but his willingness to press on despite repeated putdowns from
his friends (jokingly), his crush Jenny (seriously), and unseen school
monster/bully Chester (painfully) is what gives him his considerable charm. Nate’s
strengths lie in not minding detention (which is good, since he gets it so
frequently); in setting up highly creative events for Prank Day (“releasing a
pack of raccoons in the faculty lounge,” for example, and using the Internet to
set up his nemesis Mrs. Godfrey on a date with a lovesick rodeo clown); and in
trash talk, at which he is the undisputed school champion. There is,
unfortunately, little of Nate’s own cartooning in the latest Big Nate collection, The Crowd Goes Wild! But there are
plenty of Nate-isms here. For instance, Nate worries about the highly advanced
younger student who is his book buddy, and who is reading a work by Flaubert –
Nate feels obliged to tell the teacher that Peter is using the
inappropriate-sounding word “Bovary.” Also, Jenny – like the rest of the school
– is delighted at the return from a six-month absence of Artur, Jenny’s
super-competent andsuper-likable
boyfriend; but Nate, whose jealousy knows no bounds, cannot help what Artur
calls his “facial expressings” as he watches Jenny and Artur together. Whether
worrying about his legacy as class president, admiring the looks of an older
woman (a college-age lifeguard), or enduring the inept sports aspirations of
his father (a character right out of many decades of feckless dads), Nate
manages to retain a sense of buoyant optimism that fans of Peirce’s strip are
certain to enjoy – especially as a refreshing change of pace from some of the
much-more-serious strips out there.